TinEye - The Reverse Image Search Engine

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TinEye: An image search engine for finding copies of your pictures


TinEye is a different kind of search engine.


"It's being used by researchers who need to find where an image came from to provide attribution, even people who are trying to find out who people are in old photos. We had somebody who had a photograph of a soldier who'd arrived on the beach at Normandy and they couldn't find their name. They did a whole bunch of searches on TinEye and found a tiny little photo on an American website that listed everybody who'd gone to Normandy with a photograph. That's exactly when TinEye is useful, when you have an image but no words." TinEye CEO Leila Boujnane in an interview with PCPro

Rather than matching words, it matches images. It's also my favourite FireFox add-on!

 


Your art and images - where are they now? TinEye can be used to find stolen art, as well as to track the spread of images and memes across the internet (Lolcats, anyone?)



"I love that icon! What a beautiful photo! Where is it from?"

If you see a wonderful banner, a painting you like the look of, an icon, or uncredited piece of art and you want to find out who painted it and where it came from, or even a Lolcat that you remember with a different caption, then TinEye can help!

First launched on May 6, 2008, it was beta only for a while, and now is freely available to everyone.

Warning!

TinEye is addictive. I now automatically install the plugin on every computer I'm on! Including at work!

The Boring Background 

What is TinEye?

Reverse image searching is a form of Content-based image retrieval . TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.

TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.

TinEye is a reverse image search engine developed and offered by Idée, Inc., a company based in Toronto, Canada. The use of the Web application is free of charge for customers. According to the company, TinEye is the first web-based image search engine to use image identification technology. Currently, the technology is an Open beta release. Idée launched the service on May 6, 2008.tineye.com ? Releases. Retrieved 2009-03-20.

An image which a user uploads to the Web applicationrest...

read the rest of the Wikipedia article

Who Am I? 

My interest in TinEye

I'm an artist of sorts, and a marine biology postgraduate student - this means I have both a stake in seeing where my art gets to, an interest in artists and finding the creators of images, and a lot of practice researching online! (The better you get, the fewer times you have to go get a book, and the more you can get from the databases)

I also work as a librarian, which mainly involves helping people with computers, but has a bit of research thrown in!

If you'd like to set up your own lens, please join me!

Registration 

The Benefits of Signing Up on TinEye

You don't have to have an account - and I hardly ever remember to log in to mine (I created it because it was required when still in beta mode)

But if you do sign up your searches are saved and you get permanent URL links to your searches that can be bookmarked, shared with friends, blogged, and so on - rather than discarded after 72 hours.

How To Use TinEye - Searches and Plugins 

Searching For Images




"We received a number of e-mails from companies that run online dating services and basically what their members have done is use TinEye to actually find out if a profile is fake"
Site users would submit profile images to TinEye and discover that they were freely available online. The Daily Herald Tribune

You can enter the image directly on the search page or you can install the Firefox or Internet Explorer plugin or the Bookmarklet for any browser (which sits in your bookmarks and searches for images on whatever page you are one when you click it).

Getting the image URL
Rightclick on the picture
Select Copy image location/image URL from your browser popup menu (which it is varies between browers)

or
Enter the address of the page the picture is on. TinEye will pull all the images it can find and ask you which one you want to search for.
(It doesn't always get everything). This acts the same way as the Bookmarklet.

But the picture isn't online!
If you've got an old photo sitting on your hard drive and you want to know where it came from, you can upload a file directly to TinEye.
Restrictions: Up to one megabyte (1MB) and as a JPEG, GIF or PNG.

Or install the addon
...and simply rightclick on interesting images as you browse.

TinEye Reverse Image Search
TinEye is a reverse image search engine built by Id%uFFFDe currently in beta. Give it an image and it will tell you where the image appears on the web.
Install the TinEye plugin for FireFox
The plugin adds a right-click menu item that allows you to search for an image to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.

Version 0.7
Works with Firefox: 1.5 - 3.6.*
Updated November 2, 2009
Developer Idee Inc
Homepage http://www.tineye.com/
Rating Rated 5 out of 5 stars 51 reviews
Downloads 364,616
Install the TinEye plugin for IE
(Warning: automatically begins installing)
Bookmarklet - TinEye
The TinEye bookmarklet allows you to search for any images appearing on the web page you are viewing, without having to go to TinEye first. Unlike the TinEye plugin - which allows you to right-click an image to search for it - the bookmarklet is a little script that is run from your browser's bookmark menu. When you click the bookmarklet, it submits the URL of the web page you are viewing to TinEye, fetches the images, and asks you to choose which image to search (just like when you paste a web page URL to the TinEye search page).

Note: The TinEye bookmarklet is recommended for users of Opera, Safari and Safari for the iPhone (which do not support the TinEye plugin).

Searching For Images 

A Video Walkthrough

(Note, this was made a year ago, when TinEye was still in beta mode)

TinEye.com - Walkthrough

TinEye.com - Walkthrough of the image search engine

Runtime: 249
1243 views
3 Comments:

curated content from YouTube

Have You Used TinEye? 

If you have, I'd be interested in hearing your stories! Please leave me a comment later in the lens sharing your experience?


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Is TinEye Any Good? 

What do you think?


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Is it worth using TinEye to search for images?

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Yes! It's really helpful!

Patta52 says:

This seems to be a very interesting and worthwhile piece of software that I'm definitely going to check out.

Posted December 06, 2009

skiesgreen says:

It looks wonderful. can't wait to get it.

Posted November 01, 2009

No It's useless/another one is better/I have other concerns.

 

Examples of Success... My First Art Theft 

Finding My Stolen Artwork - Symbolic Flows(Colours of the Imagination)

This is my most popular image in my Zazzle store, and my most viewed painting on RedBubble.
it is also my first known case of art theft...

Symbolic Flows - Colours of the Imagination print
Symbolic Flows - Colours of the Imagination

The TinEye search found it in another gallery on DeviantART - the file was renamed and wouldn't have come up when searching for related keywords. The user had uploaded it under their name and claimed ot have made it using a variety of (increasingly farfetched) techniques. (Actually, this last bit was just silly, as I tell everyone who bothers to read the description that it was painted in ArtRage)

(Note: the image has been taken down , since I reported it, but remains in the cache)

Finding Music  

Search the album cover from your own photo!

TinEye Music

TinEye Music is a great way to find out more about an album simply by taking a photo of it. Photograph any album cover and TinEye's image identification system will recognize it and give you links for that album on iTunes, allmusic.com, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Listen to song samples, read album reviews and band bios, or buy music right from your iPhone, instantly. No need for typing.

Runtime: 57
11423 views
13 Comments:

curated content from YouTube

Winter Fox: Example Search 

TinEye and DeviantART

I picked a much more popular picture for my next demonstration - Winter Fox, a gorgeous photograph of a red fox standing in the snow, from Nate Zeman on DeviantART.

winter fox

Winter Fox, by Nzeman on DeviantART

And here is my permanent URL to the search results

Understanding the Results 

Identifying theft from searches, using the results

This photograph brought up eighteen results.<br /> <br /> <br />

This photograph brought up eighteen results.


This photograph brought up eighteen results.
Note the size - the deviantART thumbnail view is about 100 pixels wide (varies with image)
The thumbnail appears on user profile pages, when they favourite or feature a picture.
In other words? Not theft.

This allows you to eliminate half the search results for this image.
And focus on the problems...

Finding The Artist 

Finding the original artist through TinEye

I searched on this cropped image of the 'island girl' in the hopes of finding the original artist.

I searched on this cropped image of the 'island girl' in the hopes of finding the original artist.

I searched on this cropped image of the 'island girl' in the hopes of finding the original artist.
To my surprise, she pops up all over the internet - and is actually a mermaid! Now, twenty results isn't huge, but most will be useless.
As you can see, there is a whole mix of images, including larger versions.
Now, I know I have a modified version, and that the original would be either the same size or larger, so I sort by 'Biggest Image'.
From there I select the largest - one with a small signature in the corner. Unfortunately, it's still unreadable. It now looks like a photomanipulation (there's a carving behind her, and the rock and mermaid are much more detailed than the background)
So I search again, using the larger image.
Unfortunately, it's the best match around - but it does bring up thirty four results, this time around. A quick scan shows that most of them are blogs or photobucket accounts, nothing that looks like an artist's site (I check a few, but don't find anything useful), and none of the blogs and collections of mermaid pictures credit the original artist.
Scanning the file names shows a few repeated uses of 'IslandMermaid.jpg" so I try a <a href="http://deviantart.com">DeviantART</a> and a <a href="http://images.google.co.nz/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi">Google Image</a> search (which both bring up a lot of hits), but either the phrase 'Island Mermaid" is too common, or that wasn't the original filename, and I find nothing.

A more careful look shows that all the elements - the rock, the girl and her flower, the palms and the carving - look Maori or Pasifika. So perhaps 'pacific mermaid' might yield better results...


Tracking Down Photographs From An Email 

Finding the original picture

Someone sent my manager one of those memish 'Best Photographs of... [insert year here]" emails, with some rather fantastic photographs. Unfortunately, there was no credit given, and she wanted to know where they showed. A quick google found theoriginal site the email came from, which was equally unhelpful.

So I dived into TinEye. (Actually, first I installed it).
The results pages were many, so I found the biggest versions and started looking for official site names. And finally I found them... credited in the Guardian website, but not coming up in TinEye. Of course, all I had to do then was search for the original website, and voila!
I had found the National Geographic! And a bit of browsing through their galleries turned up the photos, and descriptions.
Through the Lens: National Geographic Greatest Photographs (National Geographic Collectors Series)

Through the Lens: National Geographic Greatest Photographs (National Geographic Collectors Series)

by: National Geographic

Amazon Price: $11.53 (as of 01/02/2010)Buy Now
List Price: $16.95

Avg. Customer Rating: Amazon Rating

Navigating TinEye 

Interpreting the Results

If only a few results come up, it's easy. If a lot of results are listed, it gets confusing. Here are some tips to figuring out the search results.

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1

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Size Matters

If it's tiny, it is probably an avatar, an image l more...0 points

2

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Look For Larger Versions

If you're starting from a cropped image, find the more...0 points

3

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Don't Trust It

TinEye isn't complete. It also retains cached imag more...0 points

4

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Look at the URLs

The image URLs may have the original artist or tit more...0 points

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TinEye Failures: My Daily Deviation 

What do you mean, nothing?

TinEye isn't perfect.. It began with 702 million pages, and as of the 22nd of October, it has indexed billions of images, and still isn't turning up most of my known duplicates. For example, this search on one of my stock images.

As you can see above, it found nothing.



This photo is my most popular stock image and has been downloaded over 600 times.

Finding Your Images In Other Ways 

When TinEye fails you...

Google Similar Images allows you to find similar pictures from your results

Above, is an example of what I found when searching for the same picture I found through TinEye. As you can see it brings up more - but all are associated with my title and belong to me.

Google Image Search

You can search the title, the artist name, or the subject.
One trick of mine is searching part of the file name - eg (title).jpg and (title).png (of other formats - or (artist name)
this is obviously doesn't find images with the fileneames changed, but does find quite a few. Remember my stock photo?

Well, this is what I found...


(By the way - Google Image search also only brought back my original DeviantART page, so did no better than TinEye)

Share Your Story 

How Has TinEye Helped or Hindered You?


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Some Twittered Testimonials 

Real Experiences of TinEye

Best of:

Community write-ins:

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The Idee Blog 

News From the Developers of TinEye

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TinEye Reviews 

Other opinions on the Image Search

Quite a few people around the interent have used TinEye - read their reviews!
TinEye – The Reverse Image Search Engine « AltSearchEngines
TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image ...
DreyX: Reverse Image Search TinEye
TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. Given an image to search for, TinEye tells you where and how that image appears all over the web?even if it has been modified. ...
TinEye Review – Reverse Image Search Engine
TinEye is a reverse image search engine that can find where images came from, how they are currently being used, if there are any modified versions, and even to find any higher resolutions copies of a particular image.
Reverse image search engine TinEye « AltSearchEngines
TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to find out where it came from, how it is being used, to find modified versions of the image or higher resolution versions. ...
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Copyright and Image Searches 

Other Useful Lenses

These lenses all go into more detail about copyright and image searching. If you have something similar, let me know and I'll consider adding it!


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Welcome to 'you thought we wouldn't notice' a site dedicated to pointing out those things that give you that feeling of 'haven't I seen that somewhere before?"

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Feedback! 

Find anything useful?

Please leave me a comment!

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  • Reply
    lravidlearner lravidlearner Nov 30, 2009 @ 6:22 pm
    Sounds like a really useful tool for everyone who creates images. Thanks for sharing how it works. I've added your lens to Technology in the Education Age Headquarter. It's featured in Technology Tools for Teachers.
  • Reply
    JessicaRabb JessicaRabb Nov 10, 2009 @ 11:29 pm
    can i just say this is the coolest weirdest concept I have ever heard all at the same time but I love it!!!! I love discovering new things on the web through the eyes of others.
  • Reply
    skiesgreen skiesgreen Nov 1, 2009 @ 1:49 am
    Wonderful information and something I was not aware of. Thank you 5* fave
  • Reply
    makingamark makingamark Oct 31, 2009 @ 8:24 am
    Thanks for featuring my lens about Copyright and Orphan Artworks - Resources for Artists.

    I was most interested to read about Tineye - I've not come across it before but am now off to take a look!
  • Reply
    Flynn_the_Cat Flynn_the_Cat Oct 25, 2009 @ 2:29 am | in reply to mysticmama
    Oh, I don't think most artists mind that - I'd be quite happy myself for that level of use!
    But what does happen, and even more to the very big artists, is that it ends up on products in a Zazzle store or something similar (there was one a couple of weeks ago set up on Etsy with pages of digital scrapbooking files from hundreds of artists) - and every artist would like to be credited! There's even been cases where people set themselves up with entire stolen galleries - from a single artist - and started selling them; companies using art on book covers; music CDs; clothing... and the artist never knew.
    Also, you're right about thieves usually being found out; but when you're browsing a gallery on DA and you're not quite sure about them, being able to check and see that actually 'their' art is not theirs is quite handy. And in cases like that - and I've seen a few Zazzle galleries like that too, Tineye may be the only way of finding the original artist.
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